Youth & Community

Commissioner Lumon May: “It’s Up to Us to Construct It”

In the wake of the deadly July 4th downtown shooting, Escambia County Commissioner Lumon May joined Rick’s Blog Live to talk about what the community owes its kids.

The conversation started where so many in Pensacola have started this week: the July 4th-5th shooting downtown that killed Philip “PJ” Sheppard, an incident that involved a significant number of young people, some still in middle and high school. After hearing from Pensacola Police Chief Eric Winstrom earlier in the broadcast, I turned to Escambia County Commissioner Lumon May, co-founder of the Southern Youth Sports Association (SYSA), to ask a harder question: what are we actually doing for the youth in this community?

From Poster Boards to a $3 Million Center

May’s answer started with his own childhood. He grew up at the Salvation Army’s Fricker Center, where his grandmother worked as a custodian for 33 years. As a teenager, he began organizing informal basketball tournaments for his brother and neighborhood friends, drawing brackets on poster board and printing team T-shirts by hand.

“A guy by the name of Tom Big came back one day and said, ‘Who organized all this?’ And somebody said, ‘He did.’ And he said, ‘Hey, would you like to get paid for doing this?'”

That moment turned into a career. By 19, May was running a community youth development program that grew to serve roughly 1,200 kids across Aragon Court, Attucks Court, Escambia Arms, Truman Arms, Warrington Village and Moreno Court—housing communities that, in his words, historically “couldn’t get along.” SYSA alumni include NFL players Trent Richardson, Doug Baldwin and Reggie Evans, among other professional athletes.

Building SYSA and Reclaiming Legion Field

In 2004, facing funding cuts within the Salvation Army’s national structure, May and a group of partners—John Chandler, Bobby Watkins, Ray Palmer and Jason McGruder—founded the Southern Youth Sports Association (SYSA), partnering with the City of Pensacola under then-City Administrator Jody Skelton. The partnership continues today.

SYSA took over a Legion Field that had been all but abandoned.

“Not only abandoned, Rick, but shoot-outs. There were killings in the basketball court. Nobody would even walk down Gregory Street.”

The city helped fix the bleachers and cut the grass, and the complex eventually grew to include the Soul Bowl and the Theophalis May Center— a gymnasium named for May’s father. As the program outgrew that facility, the community raised more than $3 million to build the new Rafferty Center at Legion Field, with a targeted completion date of Sept. 7.

Asked what SYSA offers kids that curfews and enforcement can’t, May laid out the program’s guiding framework.

“We base our program, Rick, on the four B’s: the Bible, the Book, the Ball and the Balance… We call the ball the vehicle of liberation. It gives children the opportunity to make it out of their current condition.”

• May pushed back on the idea that curfews alone solve the problem. “No matter how many curfews we do, no matter what we say, they’re gonna find somewhere to go,” he said, whether that’s the beach, parking lot surfing, or takeovers. The job of adults, he argued, is to build structured alternatives before kids find unstructured ones.

The Call for a Teen Summit

May pointed to a specific gap: county after-school and summer programs exist, but the most vulnerable population—African American children ages 13 to 18—still lacks consistent programming built for their age group. He said he has raised the issue with the mayor and with the Children’s Trust board, on which he serves.

I closed the segment by calling for the community to build on recent summits on child care and workforce development with a dedicated summit on teens, bringing together the libraries, community centers, the city, the county and the Children’s Trust, which has the funding capacity to help fund it.

Audio Version